Dedale

In French, a maze is called dédale — and someone at IBM apparently considered that reason enough in 1986 to write an entire game around it. Hard to say if this was a weekend project or an internal toy that simply made it out, but the result is exactly as minimalist as it sounds.

Dedale is a pure-bred maze puzzle game for MS-DOS. No story, no context, no cutscenes. You have a maze, you have an entrance, you have an exit, and you have time. That's all. The goal is to navigate the maze before the timer runs out, and each completed maze pushes you to the next one — tougher, with stricter limits. Your score depends on how quickly you find your way out.

The controls are exactly as simple as you'd expect: arrow keys, movement, walls stop you. No physics, no tricks. Playability stands and falls with how well the mazes are designed — and here Dedale is solidly functional, nothing more. Whether generated or hand-crafted, the mazes are clear, they make sense, and the difficulty genuinely ramps up. It's not a game that'll surprise you with brilliant design, but it won't trap you in a senseless tangle of corridors just to look hard either.

What do we remember from 1986? Usually not this. Dedale is the kind of software that got passed around on diskettes among colleagues or downloaded from BBS boards, played during a lunch break, and nobody ever wrote a review about it. IBM as publisher here is more of a curiosity than a quality stamp — plenty of similar little programs came out back then. Today the game has aged with perfect neutrality: there's nothing to break or admire about it. It simply works the way it was supposed to work in the year it came out.

Anyone playing it today in a browser will be entertained for about five minutes — or twenty, if they're into straightforward puzzles without the frills. It's not nostalgia for people who remember it, because basically nobody actually remembers this. It's more of an archaeological artifact: proof that even in 1986, someone wrote a game just because they liked the word dédale. Worse reasons exist.